


taste like mercy

by Confabulatrix



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Drama, F/M, Post-Canon, Reincarnation, Romance, The Drift (Pacific Rim)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-23
Updated: 2014-08-23
Packaged: 2018-02-14 08:30:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2184873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Confabulatrix/pseuds/Confabulatrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They meet again for the first time in Hong Kong.</p>
<p>(It’s the last first time they’re ever going to have.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	taste like mercy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [saellys](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/gifts).



 

_leave our excellent souls, head for the coast_

 

 

He remembers her.

The last time they met was the day before the accident. She was married, then. They were both pilots, and that time, they both knew.

Raleigh Becket was not his name then (yet), but it is when he steps out of a helicopter in Hong Kong and she’s there in the rain. _Oh_ , he thinks, _of course_. The Marshal hands him an umbrella; he fights a small war within himself to look away from her. He loses.

_I missed you_ , he thinks and doesn’t say.

She says to the Marshal, _I imagined him differently_.

The world is ending. He didn’t really need to be told to know this is the last first time they’ll ever have. He prays to any god that might listen just this once that this time she doesn’t remember him, that she doesn’t know what they’re losing.

 

 

She remembers him.

She’s never seen Becket before but the memory of him sits in her bones like the ache of long-healed fractures. _Oh_ , she thinks, _of course_. Then she remembers why he’s here and thinks, _Oh no_.

He looks tired. He looks at her like he sets his heartbeat by hers, he looks at her like he knows her. He looks at her like he wants to say something.

She says to her father, _I imagined him differently_. She wonders whether her father knows she’s not just speaking of Mr. Becket.

He says to her in the same language, _Better or worse?_

She pauses, uncertain and pleased at once, and smiles a little with her apology, amazed that after so many lifetimes they can still surprise each other. Surely he doesn’t know. She hopes suddenly, selfishly, that he doesn’t know.

She thinks, _I am going to watch you die_.

She hopes for him that all he has to carry is the world and his brother’s ghost, that he doesn’t carry this one last disappointment with him to the grave.

(She is better at surviving than he is, historically. It’s only fair that she carry this in return.)

 

 

Some soulmates never meet, like magnets of the same polarity. They have a different sort of luck.

 

 

His room is across from hers. He’d wonder at the force of her gravitational pull but he has the quartermaster’s paperwork stating otherwise. Their exchanges are nothing but polite, perfunctory: he asks questions, and she answers. He tells himself it’s just curiosity, not trying to learn what he can to make up for the time they didn’t and won’t have.

He says nothing of how she stared at him across the hall, and she volunteers nothing in turn.

(Gravity pulls both ways between objects in orbit, he remembers from science class.)

At the briefing over Danger’s updated specs, he parses her notes and shorthand on the photocopied diagrams, reads between her carefully-drawn lines, and smiles at the tiny Hello Kitty doodle sketched into the reinforced joists of the reactor mount.

 

 

She makes no attempt to conceal her irritation with him in the kwoon. She doesn’t need the familiarity of a thousand shared lifetimes to see the way he plays with his opponents, but she speaks with the certainty of experience when she calls him out. _I know so_ , she says, because she could call his moves blindfolded from a hundred kilometers away.

(She chooses not to think of the way he devotes more attention to her displeasure than any of his matches. She also chooses not to think on how closely she follows him with her eyes to study more than his martial form.)

_Can we change this up?_ he asks.

_Yes_ , she thinks, _let’s do_.

 

 

There are no secrets in the drift.

 

 

They retreat from the hangar to his room, strip down nearly to nothing and sprawl together on his bed, pressed as close together as skin will allow. He would if she wanted, but they don't make love. No casual exchange of fluids and lust-fueled endearments can match the drift, and besides they've had those before in dozens of other lives. The particulars escape him, but the ghost of sense memory remains buried in his muscles, in his bones, echoing and rebounding through the drift between them.

_I missed you_ , he thinks and doesn't say.

She laces her fingers through his and murmurs into his skin, _I know_.

 

 

There are some constants. They always meet, always at the wrong moment: at his wedding, at her son’s funeral, after he enlists, before she boards the plane (nonstop London to New York). One of them always knows: sometimes her, sometimes him, sometimes both of them. When they both know, it’s all they can do to stay away from each other. (In every life, it’s all they can do to stay away from each other, but there are some lies they tell themselves again and again.)

They always love each other. One lifetime in a hundred, they grasp for happiness and win it, if only for a little while.

_I never did have very good timing_ , he says.

 

 

Beneath the Pacific, Mako Mori tells her father she loves him.

Another constant is this: the soul that lives beneath Stacker Pentecost's skin has been and always will be her father. In the lives they aren't blood, they find each other, cleave together closer than even atoms can manage, and thus, life after life, does their pattern hold.

He says, _You can always find me in the drift_ , like there's going to be a future for her to search in. Where there is a future, there is a life where he is her father again, a life where they dance in kitchens, her small feet resting on his, a life where they play monsters or go on picnics or celebrate report cards.

For ten years Mako has feared her father's death.

She loses him beneath the Pacific, bids him goodbye with her love, and all at once begins to hope.

 

 

Beneath the Pacific, in another world entirely, Raleigh Becket tells Mako Mori goodbye.

He's used to loss, long-accustomed to the hollowed out space below his skin where his brain and heart and nervous system tell him his brother used to live, so this isn't so bad. He can live with this, he doesn't have to live with it long, all he has to do is fall.

_Anyone can fall_ , he promises her, even as he guarantees she won't have to.

(She's better at surviving than he is, historically; he is well-practiced with the business of dying.)

A fall is nothing, he can do this alone and buy her a life with his own, buy them all another life, and next time...

 

 

Picture a future after the kaiju, when parents no longer raise their children to be afraid of the oceans. Fast-forward fifty years, perhaps a century, and think of a chilly beach in late spring, abandoned but for a few confused tourists and a boy and a girl on a picnic. They are twenty-four and twenty-two, respectively, and they are ruinously in love.

(He hasn't told her, but he remembers her.)

(She hasn't told him, but she remembers him.)

(They paid a thousand lives to earn this one, and both would call it fair.)

She leans in close to kiss him, laughing through her scarf at his terrible joke, and smiles against his mouth. He tastes like butterscotch candies and joy, and he kisses her back.

Further up the beach, nearer to the margin where sand gives way to scratchy brown sedge grass, her stepbrother yells an insult down at them, as well as a command to come back up to the house (the house her father shares with his partner), as it is bloody fucking cold. She yells back, makes a rude gesture, and grins at her grinning boy. They will have a happy ending, she thinks.

(She's right.)

So ask the question, then: what happens to Mako Mori and Raleigh Becket?

Life ends, everyone dies, even heroes.

In some worlds their story ends at the breach, a triumph with an off-note when Mako wakes up atop the choppy waves and never sees her copilot resurface. Falling is easy, it's the rising that's hard.

But some worlds (and say this is one of those), Raleigh thinks, _Screw this_ , and decides to live, and on his pod on the water when he kisses Mako's forehead she tastes like the ocean and mercy.

Life ends, and eventually everyone dies, even heroes.

But not just yet.

**Author's Note:**

> WHOOPS MY HAND SLIPPED.
> 
> I have so many projects on my plate already but this one sort of just sprang fully-formed into existence and I just couldn't leave it there, that would be terribly neglectful. Written for saellys/hauntedjaeger because she was the first ~~victim~~ witness on the scene of a tag essay gone out of control, and, well, these things do happen.
> 
> I love feedback and reviews. Kudos are also fantastic, but if you've the spoons I always appreciate knowing how I'm doing. Thank you for reading!


End file.
